


and so forth.

by keycchan



Category: Homestuck
Genre: ??? I GUESS, Blindness, Grimdark, How do tags even work, Multi, Sadstuck, includes disabilities, it has a happy end though!!! sort of, just a lot of stuff okay this is my first hamsteak fic, loss of senses, polyamorous kids learning to cope with each other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-23
Updated: 2014-10-23
Packaged: 2018-02-22 07:22:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2499431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keycchan/pseuds/keycchan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The game is over. Life continues. <br/>Kids get older, and learn to cope with what the game has left them with, or without.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and so forth.

**Author's Note:**

> First homestuck fic yadda yadda it's sad, it's pretty sad.  
> inspired by The Weepies and also my random thoughts in class about how the beta kids would be like post-SBURB when i should've been concentrating on my english paper, wow, oops.

“ _I try and try to understand,_  
 The distance in between,  
 The love I feel and the things I fear,  
And every single dream.”

_\--I’ll Try, Jonatha Brooke._

The game ends, in much a way they all expected it. There is the initial joy, the tears and the laughter. Universes are restored, though the guardians and lusii lost never return,  and they’re brought back to their own respective worlds, long and far in between. But besides that, nothing seems very wrong, nothing unexpected, though the parting is bittersweet. The Beta children find home once more in Earth, a much more peaceful Earth but otherwise similar as they had left it, minus meteor marks, and they make their own nest away from town,  a lovely cliffside home using the money left by each of their respective guardians. The idea of parting and returning to normalcy without each other is unthinkable, and at this point, a bad idea in general, so they make a home together and in each other.

John initially does not realize the scars on him, does not realize what the game has left him with, or rather, left him without, until the day he accidentally tips a kettle of boiling water onto himself, splashing onto his arm, and he feels nothing. Wet, perhaps, and slightly disappointed, but nothing more. Even as his arm turns red and swells, he stares, and only when Rose runs in and brings him to cold water, scolding him, you could’ve gotten yourself scarred, you idiot, that he realizes what he’s without.

His senses fade with time, and rapidly so. He’d thought of his lack of pain a blessing until he chops an entire fingertip off and doesn’t realize it until it bleeds all over the vegetables, staining them red and metallic. His hands and arms suffer the worst of it, and he often finds himself avoiding touching people with them until he has to, because they are scarred and burnt and gnarled red and pink with repaired tissue, and they remind him of a pain he can’t feel. And the worst part, he thinks, he knows, is that it’s not the last of it, no. The loss of physical pain is but the beginning.

The killing blow is when he bakes a cake in remembrance of his father’s passing, and wonders why something seems off. He bases it all upon memory and taste, but something in his system ticks him off the wrong way and he’s not sure what until his friends taste it and pull disgusted faces, _it’s so salty, John, what did you put in these things_ and he takes a forkful for himself and then cries, _cries_ when he realizes he can’t taste anything, can’t smell anything, anymore. What once was a comfort and a treat and a healing thing now tastes like sandpaper, smells like air, and he cries into his cake as Jade hugs him and forces Dave to eat the rest of it ( _he has a thing for salty food, it’s weird._ )

Eventually, his hearing is the last to go. It fades and fades until he can only hear things directly shouted into his ear. And with that, he loses the motivation to speak, until all John really has left is his sense of touch and sight, which remains sharp and vigilant throughout the rest of his life. The former god of Wind, a man in touch with his element and nature, used to feeling it move and caress him, tickling his neck, inhaling the scent of whatever the breeze carries, used to hearing the rustling of leaves, he wonders why the one thing that brought him joy kills him so now.

The rain comes in, and he likes to stand in it to remind himself he can still feel something, even if it’s not much.

Dave doesn’t seem to have any problems, until months after the game has ended. Then the visions start, the hallucinations, the whispers and screams of dead Daves, from doomed timelines and alternate universes, he sees their corpses lying everywhere, in the sink and in the tub and on Jade’s favourite rug to lie on and on John’s piano and on Rose’s side of the couch and they haunt him mercilessly. He speaks of it to no one until they start getting more and more real, and the rest of them only learn of it after a car accident that takes his sight, after a dead Dave lands crashing onto his windshield and sends him off the road and down into a ravine. They know then what the game has taken away from him, and from then on the sunglasses are no longer just for show. Jade cries for him, John pats his back, and he tells them that it’s okay, he prefers it this way, where he doesn’t have to see them anymore and he can ‘ _keep his sweet shades on for-fucking-ever, bitches_ ’.

 Rose is the only one who understands completely, and he loves her for it. She is the first he comes to when the whispers echo in his ears, louder with his heightened senses after his sight disappeared, and she knows just the right things to say, just the right tone to say it in, and even though the other two treat him with the equal amount of love and care as she does, her voice is especially calming. He handles the disability with stride(r), asking John to make him an appropriately ironic walking stick ( _it’s based off of SBAHJ, and looks like the demented walking-stick cousin of Sord_ ) and spends most of his time making jokes about his own blindness. They know it’s for his own sake, and they play along accordingly.

Jade works. She works, on and on and on, never stopping until she collapses, because that’s the only way she can sleep, these days. Her old escape, her world of dreams and magic and space, they don’t exist for her anymore. Sleep comes difficult, it’s nails raking against the floor against it’s will, and she often stays up for days, weeks, sleeping only when she collapses and waking mere hours later, emerging dreamless, and staying alive only due to some kind of semi-immortality the game had given all of them. She spends her nights tinkering, working and working, and within the first five months of ending the game, she already releases a ground-breaking scientific discovery that shakes the world and brings her fame, though she ends up never particularly caring for it. They all know it’s because there is nothing much else for her to do, in the dead of the night, and she prefers productivity over dogs-in-socks videos, however amusing and adorable they are.

Once in a while, she sleeps, though. Truly, truly sleeps. A sleep like death, even, because on those times, she sleeps and doesn’t wake for a long, long while. At first, it alarms them to no end, Dave frantically searching for a pulse and John and Rose fearing the worst. But though her heart beats steady and strong, she doesn’t wake, doesn’t have any control of when she does, and when it happens often enough, they discover it’s just yet another aftermark of what the game had left them. On good occasions, she sleeps only for a few days, and on bad times, up to many, many months. And though her body sustains itself somehow and Rose bathes her regularly and Dave sleeps next to her every night, she still feels misplaced, always lagging behind everyone else, missing massive chunks of her life. It takes at least an hour of ear scratching and snuggles and John’s homemade snausages to make her feel at least slightly at ease again.

Rose suffers the worst of these things. Her aspect is Light, and though it shines bright upon her being, the shadows are cast long and deep, and her nights are filled constantly with nightmares and horrorterrors unimaginable to most but few. They curl around her, whispers that make her heart feel like lead, flooding her lungs with ocean water, dark and curling and cold, seasalt and shells caught in the flesh of her being. The nightmares happen frequently, twice a week at least, and she rises each time with sweat colder than ice and blue, blue lips, trembling and bleeding and bitten, and it takes the warmth of a boiling hot bath to bring her back fully. Sleep is hell, a dark as pitch and cold as ice hell, and the only solution she has is to not sleep.

Coffee becomes her best friend, pills to keep her awake, her books and her writing and her loves to keep her sane. She joins Jade in the work-until-you-collapse parade, though with her porcelain-pale skin and small appetite, the dark circles and pronounced wrist bones are far more noticeable. Still, she keeps herself healthy as best she can, John forcing her to eat as long as he has a say in it, Dave her confidant as they share the same echoes, and Jade her companion through the night and into the dawn until one of them collapses. It is like this, and they live like this, as the world continues going as it is.

Sometimes, though these times are few and far in between, the three of them come together and find Rose melted all over the bathroom, her skin inky and darker than pitch, wisps of darkness coming off of her skin, her body slithery and like liquid-y mist, ice cold and not quite there. Hair as white as ivory, and a body that melts and slips in between fingers like mist, but not quite, and her whispers, oh, her words. They travel out of her mouth, slip out of her tongue and through her teeth, a language not fit to be heard by humans, slithering from her throat, something raspy but silky smooth and dark and wrong and twisted but right all at the same time, and they take turns to take care of her like this, because it lasts weeks, even a month, and Rose swears it’s the game’s way of getting back at her for trying to break it so many times. Jade is the only one who can understand her eldritch tongue, being one of space and knowing what it all holds, but John is the only one who can _stand_ her, because he is the only one unable to hear the grimdarkness that drips from her tongue like smothering velvet, he is the only one who can sit and smile with her for hours. Dave is the only one who can clean the bathtub she likes to inhabit, is the only one who can change the water daily and hold her for a little while, speeding her recovery back to normalcy, because his touch is gentle and knowing, because he can’t see much else.

Boiling water is the best way to speed up her process to return to normal, they find. And after the last of the inky darkness melts away from her skin, all three of them help her bathe away the icyness of her soul and skin and stop her from shivering. Jade to jump in the bath with her, and John and Dave to sit by the tub and crack stupid jokes.

 They stay together, out of love and out of necessity. Because only they know the pain and truth of the game that destroyed and re-pieced their worlds, and only they know how to comfort each other in times of pain. Living elsewhere with anyone else would be both inconvenient and risky, for more parties than one, so they stay as they are, holding each other together and healing.

They live like this, somehow. They spend the day in each other’s company, as much as they can. Jade does her work, researching something, building something. Rose knits or writes, often with either John or Dave in her lap. John makes lunch, Dave there to make sure the food is alright and that he doesn’t hurt himself, and then they eat and laugh and go back to work after, whoever was last has to clean ( _more often than not it’s either Rose or John, and it’s okay_ ) and then at night, it’s dinner, and Jade is talking about her latest project or Rose is talking about her latest story development or Dave is blasting holes into John’s latest favourite movie as John aggressively signs at him an argument and ends it with a pointed, very firm finger in the face.

 Rose and Jade keep each other company in the night, sharing secrets, braiding hair, pointing out constellations in the night sky reminiscent of the friends they’d known and left behind, trading kisses to remind each other that they’re still here. Sometimes they go back to work, other times they decide to do something, often something wild and silly, and there are many times where Dave wakes up to find them gone and finds them on the beach, building silly and architecturally firm sandcastles, feet buried in the ocean and coated in seafoam. Sometimes he drags them back in because it’s cold as balls outside, leading them back to the house where John is just grinning at them and laughing soft laughter. Sometimes he joins them, dragging John with him, and they wake up by shoving each other into the cold, salty morning waves, watching the sun leave pink hues in the sky as it rises. There are Egberts to be buried in the ground, and Striders to tickle into the water, Lalondes to shove in and Harleys to knock down sandcastles with. There is laughter, there are smiles, there are kisses traded between salty lips and sandy fingers intertwining as they go back inside, bringing the sand in with them, to be swept aside and forgotten until the next cleaning day.

 Sleeping together, when sleeping happens, is with whoever is available, anytime. Usually John and Dave share the bed, holding each other, John as his anchor and Dave to wake him up in the mornings by feeling his face and kissing it awake, pressing dry lips to each gnarled and scarred-white knuckle. When Jade collapses they take turns, though often it is Dave as well, senses heightened and able to tell the exact second she’s about to wake, ready to greet her with a nose pinch and bad morning breath. Rose sleeps as little as possible, and John is the only person who can sleep with her when it happens, because when the nightmares become too much and she moves in her sleep, he’s the only person who can wake and smile as she chokes him, her nails raking at his throat, the whispers of eldritch promises spilling from her lips.

They keep busy with what they can. Besides Rose’s writing career and Jade’s stay-at-home research and study, Dave does part time deejay-ing at a club not too far away, and even though he can’t see, his hearing is impeccable, his tunes and beats perfect, and he feels the music around him. Sometimes they visit him, even though John can’t hear the songs he remixes and scratches on the turntables he’s so talented with, and even though Rose finds his brand of music to be particularly atrocious. John spends most of his time doing odd jobs, sometimes teaching sign language to children at an orphanage down in the city, sometimes writing movie reviews on his blog.

They live like this, and for what it’s worth, it’s okay, because at least they have each other, they have each other and they will fight tooth and claw before the game can take that away from each other.

 

 

“ _I thought of you and where you’d gone,  
and let the world spin madly on._ ”

_\--World Spins Madly On, The Weepies._

Approximately once every six months, they receive an email from the trolls.

It’s mostly thanks to Jade’s scientific genius and Sollux’s talent with tech that they manage to establish a connection in the galaxy. But it’s either by mathematical mistake or by the game that they cannot send it instantly, as they used to. It takes months to receive, and months to reply. So once every six months, the kids receive another reminder that the trolls exist, that they’re not insane, and once every six months, they take time off of whatever they’re doing to read through and reply.

Most of the time it’s Karkat or Kanaya typing, occasionally Terezi, and the rest just pop in a few brief lines, some none at all. Updates, usually, on how things are. Alternia and Beforus had combined into something beautiful and new, a near-perfect balance world of the olds combined, balancing blood castes and appropriate places in society. Kanaya tells them that Meenah and Feferi have finally settled down their bloodthirsty need to kill each other, and have flipped quadrants from kissmesistude to moirallegiance, and for the better good. Karkat tries to hide his pride in his friend, but even when he says their new titles, Jade and John can smell his pride from galaxies away, the way he says Her Imperial Patronization and Her Imperial Benevolence, and they’re glad for it.

The kids take their time to reply, each one of them sitting down before the screen, sometimes for hours at a time. John and Rose are both casual and loving in their replies, Jade’s block of green text filled with plenty of exclamations!!! and smilies galore. She has taken to talking to Sollux as well, trying to think of ways, new and better ways to connect. Dave types quickly but lengthier than anyone else, filled to the brim with irony, metaphors and badly concealed affection and bittersweet longing.

( _When she thinks he can’t hear her, Rose sneaks on the computer to spellcheck his words, correcting any major mistakes and leaving the rest as is._ )

( _He can hear her each and every time, and he’s thankful._ )

And then it’s back to life as usual, bittersweet but strong, living on coffee and the seabreeze by the cliff each morning, and each other, most of all. Sometimes things go bad, like when Jade sleeps through five months straight without any hint of waking, like when John falls on rocks near the seaside and walks all the way back home with a broken leg and doesn’t realize it until the bone breaks the skin, like when Dave can’t stop the screaming of the doomed timelines and when Rose wakes up from another night of horrorterrors, vomiting slime onto the bed, slicker than oil and darker than ink. Those times are the times when they’re reminded of how much they need each other, a codependency not because they want to but because they would hurt themselves and others otherwise.

Times when they feel like they’re going out of their minds, when they’re not sure of where they’ve been and where they’re going, times where they feel afraid or worried, times where they’re afraid their messages don’t send, times where they feel terrified for their friends. It is a horrible feeling.

( _The alpha kids have been unreachable since the end of the game. The last they ever heard from them was Jane and Jake going off to live far, far away, in an island or in the mountains, because Jake needed the familiarity of the wilderness again and Jane needed peace. Dirk and Roxy weren’t heard from at all._  )

But there are other times. Better times.

Times at the beach, where the ocean comforts them with what it can, reminds them that most powerful things can give and take. Times in Jade’s truck, driving off into the sunset, sky tinged with shades of orange and pink, kissing their cheeks tea rose, Sweet Disposition playing, Dave’s head out the window, smiling, sunglasses off and milky eyes staring into a sunset he can’t see, just feeling, _feeling_ the wind in his hair, John laughing loudly in the back, happily, Jade and Rose holding hands in the front and enjoying the scenery as Rose comments on how ‘this could definitely be a picture on a vintage soft-grunge indie blog.’

Times in Jade’s rented cabin, mosquitoes devouring the Strilondes, Jade laughing, John hiding Dave’s tube of suntan for the sheer joy of seeing him come in from a day of river swimming and tyre swinging, red as beet. Times in Dave’s club, everyone bopping along to the music and dancing like absolute idiots, John and Rose the most awkward dancers to exist probably, Jade’s limbs flying everywhere, and Dave resisting the strong urge to facepalmx2 combo. Times where they make dinner together and it takes like shit because Rose wants it sweet and Jade wants it spicy and Dave wants it salty and in the end only John can eat it, laughing at them.

And most of all, times together under the stars, huddled close together, hands intertwined, noses in hair and whispered words of affection. They smile and press gentle lips together and point towards the sky, talking about anything and everything, watching the stars and the signs of the friends they might never see again, laughing and holding until heads nod off, lolling to a silent lullaby, a childish tune, at peace and calm, at least for now. They’re okay, at least for now. At least while they have each other to hold them together. They can be okay. They _will_ be okay.

 

 

“ _The sky could be blue, could be grey,_  
Without you I just slide away.  
The sky could be blue, I don’t mind,  
Without you it’s a waste of time.”

_\--Strawberry Swing, Coldplay._


End file.
